Sunday, April 9, 2017

The first of the three
films Lifetime showed from 6 p.m. to midnight April 8 was Girl Followed, an obvious pun on Girl, Interrupted but really a pretty conventional Lifetime tale of
a young woman being the target of obsessive stalking and sabotage from a
somewhat older man. This time around the girl was 14-year-old Regan Lindstrom
(Emma Fuhrmann) — interestingly everyone pronounces her first name “RAY-gun,”
the way Ronald Reagan did as a politician, rather than the “REE-gun”
pronunciation one would think would go with the spelling without the first “a”
(and which Ronald Reagan used during his movie-star days). Regan simply can’t
catch a break; her parents Jim (Joey Lawrence) and Abby (Heather McComb) spy on
her constantly and treat her with all the sensitivity and love of
concentration-camp commandants — this is one of those stories in which the
parents are so good at keeping tabs on their kids (not only Regan but her older
sister Taylor, played by Gianna LaPera) one wonders why they don’t make some
real money with these skills by working for the CIA or NSA. They’re
particularly down on any boy
she expresses even the slightest romantic interest in, and so of course Regan
rebels at the earliest opportunity. When her crush object Austin (Jake Elliott)
breaks up with her and goes with her cuter and richer best friend Sabine
(Olivia Nikkanen) instead, Sabine tells Regan her secret was she sent Austin
selfies of her in her underwear, and if she wants to get him back Regan should
do the same. She does so, and Sabine critiques the photos, saying that she
looks good in red (her bra was red) but she needs sexier undies to strike lust
in the heart of her chosen male. Accordingly, on a shopping trip for clothes
with her mom, Regan shoplifts a hot, sexy bra and panties — we get the
impression it’s less because the family can’t afford them and more because mom
would never buy things like that for her in a million years — and her new set
of sexted selfies gets spread all over the school and instantly earns her a
reputation as a slut.

Meanwhile, Regan frequently visits mom, who works as a
nurse, at her hospital, where one of mom’s duties is giving out tests and
treatments for STD’s (which may be offered by the writers, Christine Conradt,
Chris Lancey and Melissa Cacera, as an explanation for why she’s so otherwise inexplicably overprotective of
Regan: she sees young people coming in with the wages of sexual experimentation
every day!) — and she’s attracted the lascivious attentions of Nate (Travis
Caldwell), the STD clinic’s 22-year-old receptionist. Nate is a young man who
doesn’t need to work — he
lives in a big house and is pretty much alone because his super-rich parents
spend most of their time on vacation (indeed, I recognized the house from a
previous Lifetime movie, though I can’t remember right now which one) — and
he’s also a suspect in the mysterious disappearance of Lana, another teenage
girl from the same town. Of course the moment we see Travis Caldwell, who’s
tall, dark-haired, baby-faced and drop-dead gorgeous, we know he’s going to be
the sinister stalker who’s going to menace Our Heroine — and indeed he does,
though he ramps up his campaign of revenge or obsession or whatever to attack
her parents as well. He sends copies of Regan’s underwear pics to the board of
directors of the nonprofit her dad works for, thereby not only costing him the
promotion he was hoping for but risking getting him fired, and in the film’s
most sinister scene he trashes the medical chart of a child being treated by
Abby at the hospital and substitutes a fake one, so Abby gives him a shot of
penicillin even though the kid’s real chart warned that he was allergic to it. (This is
yet more evidence of how modern medical care all too often relies on numbers
and charts instead of actually talking to people; had Abby bothered to ask the
boy’s mother, who was there the whole time, if her son was allergic to
penicillin, she would have told her he was and so Abby would never have given
him the potentially fatal shot.)

Conradt’s presence hints at a more interesting
movie than the one that got made, and if she had been in charge of the whole
project instead of just co-writing an “original” (quotes definitely
appropriate!) story that got turned into a script by a third scribe, she
probably would have made Nate a more complex character and given at least a
hint of what made him “run.” Alas, she wasn’t, and so Nate got depicted as your
typical generic Lifetime sex-crazed maniac who gets progressively crazier as
the film goes on. Also, Conradt, Lancey and Cacera offered no clue about how
Abby would have reacted when she realized that the mysterious figure menacing
her daughter was someone she worked with and therefore knew well and trusted.
But the real person who
screwed up this movie wasn’t any of the writers, nor was it director Tom Shell
(who did a perfectly workmanlike, though far from great, job with it), but the
casting director, Mary Jo Slater. First of all, though Heather McComb and Emma
Fuhrmann look enough alike to be believable as coming from the same family,
McComb is young enough she looks more like Fuhrmann’s older sister than her mom
— and Joey Lawrence looks even younger. Lawrence has got a hot, blond, butch
male bod and certainly could give Travis Caldwell competition in the looks
department (too bad the writers gave him a character whose virtually only
emotion is blustering anger, hardly the stuff to evoke the sexual fantasies I’d
probably be having about Lawrence if I got to see him in a different sort of
role), but he and McComb simply don’t look old enough to have two teenage
daughters. And what’s more, the actress actually playing Regan’s older sister,
Gianna LaPera, is blonde, has curly hair and a different body type from
Fuhrmann’s — though maybe we were supposed to think Regan took after her mom
and Taylor her dad, looks-wise. Girl Followed is a pretty generic Lifetime thriller, not all
that bad but not transcendent either — though it might have been considerably
better if Conradt had got to write it solo — with nice-looking people of both
(mainstream) genders enacting a pretty stupid story that offers the usual
Lifetime formulae but nothing more than that.